Amazon is about to expand its smart home offerings in a big way. The company just announced its intention to acquire Bay Area-based home mesh router startup, Eero. It’s a pretty clear fit for the online retailer as it pushes to make Alexa a feature...

Not sure how I feel about this yet. I wonder if this will affect the iOS app at all since Amazon/Apple don’t seem to be the best of friends (but maybe that has changed since Apple Music is now on Alexa).

That being said, maybe Eero needs the muscle of Amazon to blaze forward in features (there are a number I want…like the feature that would allow me to plug in my login credentials for my fiber connection, thereby getting back my advanced controls instead of just using in bridge mode).

I don’t want Alexa / Amazon / Bezos sitting on all my routers and access points listening to all the data flowing back and forth inside and from / to my home network. I’ve been very satisfied with Eero but will shut them down and chuck them out as soon as this deal closes.

I purchased an Eero (second generation) last year and have been really happy with it. The iOS app, coverage, and setup are all top notch. I also recently subscribed to Eero Plus, which has been great so far.

I’m a little leery of the Amazon acquisition. I wonder if they’ll continue to maintain the same high quality of the iOS app and if this will impact Eero Plus. Time will tell.

I am not at all pleased to hear this news. I am a relatively recent Eero convert as well and am happy with the product. I even signed up for Eero plus, which is not all that hard of a sell since at $99 / year it’s not that much more expensive that I was paying for my 1Password subscription which is included with Eero plus.

With Amazon owning Eero, I think there is little doubt that this will give Amazon unlimited access to track all of my network browsing, which is the main reason that I did not go with the Google home product.

Unless there is some believable assurance that Amazon is NOT going to use the Eero system to record all of this data, I will probably switch over to the Synology RT2600AC, especially now that Synology seems to have a mesh extension and hopefully software update for this purpose.

Despite my joke about Facebook, I have to say that some people’s reactions to this news seem way over the top. I’ll admit that if I were making this choice from scratch today it might have pushed me to go with Orbi (it was a very close call anyway), but I’m nowhere near the level of alarm that would lead me to get rid of my working eero system. If Amazon actually starts sending private data from people’s networks back to their servers, then dumping hundreds of dollars of networking hardware and switching to a different system would be justified. Doing so just because they bought eero?

I’ve been waiting for Wi-Fi 6 Certified mesh routers to be announced (or announcements about updates to current gear).

With Apple itself tacitly recommending Linksys Velop systems (as the only mesh products they resell), and with competitive products considered to be as good as eero (eg Ubiquiti AmpliFi HD, Netgear Orbi), I will probably end up choosing something other than an Amazon or Google replacement for my Airport Extreme/Expresses network.

Although Amazon says it’s committed to not tracking or snooping on eero (or eero plus VPN) data, that can always change. Facebook said in 2014 it would not use Whatsapp data, but three years later they are by commingling that user data with Facebook and Instagram data, with only German trying to stop them (albeit in Germany only). Amazon - the company aggressively marketing facial recognition systems to law enforcement around the country, eager to sell IOT devices with cameras in the bedroom, and whose Android Fire Phone allowed third party applications to install digital certificates without user interaction - has never been an exemplar of privacy advocation.

Perhaps you’re right @ChrisUpchurch that alarm is silly. But consider: Amazon’s core business is based on exploiting data streams – it is not retail. Alexa is all about giving access to data streams to skills providers. AWS is all about access to data streams. The core data streams in your home are your local network + internet service, and your cellular service – with heavily weighted toward the former. What else except access to your data would they want from eero?

I think amazon will leave eero alone just as they have left Blink alone. In Blink’s case, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing because I find that their customer service has become worse than before. Eero have one of the best customer service and I hope they can keep at it that way but history is not assuring me.